"Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means 'do research' in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft's Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen: the left pane is for entering search queries and switching between image, RSS, Web, and News, the middle pane contains the search results, and the right pane is used to 'dock' results using drag-and-drop for looking at later."

XUL is a graphical interface format, nothing more. SVG is limited in what it does and doesn't have true 3d AFAIK.

What he's talking about are those things combined. What he didn't mention was Flex, which is much more interesting.

With Flex you can use the Flex SDK or the Eclipse Flex Builder IDE, output to SWF and have it run anywhere on a massive installed base and you can do server-side stuff in Java, PHP, .Net or Coldfusion. Microsoft would have been better of just outputting SWF from their tools.

Silverlight is geared towards developers, and Flash and Adobe's tools are geared more towards designers. Silverlight still has a long way to go there, and is still far behind the graphic quality of Flash. Silverlight has to attract designers, not developers, no matter how cool the format is. Microsoft are also not going to port their Expression tools to the Mac any time soon, which is where a lot of designers are.

Sorry, but I can't really see this as being anything other than ActiveX in IE. Rather pointless.

That article didn't do much. I'd prefer a thorough dissection of Silverlight and Flash by somebody neutral rather than an extremely biased blog-piece by a quite frankly embarrassing developer of Silverlight.

Personally I'm welcoming Silverlight - primarily due to the use of XAML. But it's not superior in any way. Just slightly different advantages and disadvantages.

Besides that: I wrote (XUL && Flash && SVG) || (XUL || Flash || SVG). You forget answering the first part - the combination of the technologies.

And I'm stilling missing an answer for what Silverlight can offer that Flash, XUL _OR_ SVG cannot offer. The article was mostly about different ways to implement the same thing - and not about offering different functionality. Same functionality - different implementation. With a lot of factual incorrect information, btw. - Jesse Ezell doesn't know nearly enough. Obviously.